Circle Rules Football: Experimental Theater Meets Sports

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Circle Rules Football: Experimental Theater Meets Sports

NEW YORK – On a sunny afternoon in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, families are enjoying picnics, and groups of friends are playing soccer, cricket and Frisbee. In one corner of the park, a bunch of twenty-somethings play with a yoga ball. A giant, bouncy yoga ball. One guy dribbles the ball until another kicks it out of his possession, sending it flying straight through a set of tall goal posts with no net.

"That's seven to the Subjugates, four to Bunga Bunga," yells out one player.

Another quickly scoops up the ball with one hand and tosses it to his teammate, who dribbles his way closer to the goal, taking care to stay outside the perimeter of tiny cones encircling the goal posts. Dodging around the other players, he hurls the ball at his teammate who dives into the inner circle to catch it, slamming into the ground a moment before the ball soars into his outstretched arms.

Wait, that's a penalty! A player from the opposing team stands at the corner of the field with the yoga ball in front of him. In one quick, strange motion he hops up with both his legs together and kicks the ball with both his feet at the same time, sending it zooming back into the playing field. And the game is in motion once more.

It's fine if you have no idea what’s going on. The sport is Circle Rules Football, and it's only four years old.

Circle Rules, as it's usually called, was invented in 2006 by Greg Manley, a student at the Experimental Theater Wing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. For his senior independent project – equivalent to a thesis, but for actors – Manley waved aside writing his own play or producing his own show like his classmates. Instead, he spent his time churning out ideas for the development of a new sport.

The project stemmed from his personal view that all sport is theater: dramatic, theatrical, viewed by an audience of millions. Based on this perception, Manley began to envision the foundation of an entirely new activity, one that highlighted the theatricality and drama inherent in all sports.

Manley, half-Indian and half-American, was born 26 years ago in Berkeley, California. He grew up primarily in Oakland, where he attended Park Day School, whose educational mission embraces "critical and creative thinking" as well as "artistic expression."

Indeed, it was there that Manley was exposed to a different kind of phys-ed philosophy: His sports teacher, Will Hughes, had a penchant for inventing new sports and Manley and the other students benefited by learning a wide range of games that no one had every played before. The excitement and awe of constantly learning something new stuck with him.

The two things Manley (right) was certain of when it came to developing his own sport were that the game would involve a yoga ball and that it would be played in a circular arena.

His relationship with yoga balls goes back to his early childhood, when he’d see them in many of his friends' homes. It was taboo to play with them at the time, lest they break something in the house.

Later on, with the freedom afforded by adulthood, Manley decided to indulge that childhood dream and "really abuse" the yoga ball.

So Manley drew on inspirations from different facets of his upbringing and poured everything into the sport. He wanted to create a sport that assimilated all the things he had loved about sports as a kid and eliminated the things he didn't like, such as overheated competition.

"The reason the sport is like this, the reason it doesn't have any equipment, comes from me playing soccer my whole life," Manley says. "The reason there's wrestling in the middle of the field comes from me wrestling with my dad when I was growing up, as well as my love for contact sports."

Manley chose a circular field as the basis of the game because it's the shape he connects most with as an actor. When he and fellow cast members would warm up before a performance, they'd always end up in a circle facing each other. It was in that "central focus" where he was most comfortable.

From the beginning, Manley's vision was simple.

His aim was to take the game away from the typical jock culture that usually surrounds sports. He knew his theater friends would enjoy playing a game that lacked the "angry competitiveness" that normally scares non-athletes away from a lot of sports, so he stayed cognizant of that while formulating the sport's underpinnings.

>'It's such a funny thing to see two people standing just crumple to the ground. It's so bizarre. I thought a simple competition like that would serve the game well.'

Manley immediately came up with a few twists. One of these is called the "down-up," which happens in lieu of a coin toss. In order to determine who gets possession of the ball first, and in which direction their team will score, a player from each team – at the opening whistle – has to drop down, touch both shoulder blades to the ground, and get back up. Whoever does so first, wins.

"That's straight out of the Experimental Theatre Wing, where I learned how to fall, how to go from standing to level yourself as fast as possible," Manley says. "I think it's such a funny thing to see two people standing just crumple to the ground. It's so bizarre. I thought a simple competition like that would serve the game well. Artists really appreciate it, and athletes too."

Another twist is the double kick. Early on, Manley and his friends tried to come up with a unique way to get the ball back in the field when it got out of bounds. They didn't want to do just a simple free kick, so they went with something fun and a bit awkward: kicking the ball with both legs together.

"It's a weird move," Manley says. "To people who've never played, it seems ridiculous and stupid."

Because of the game's whimsical quality, Manley knew that the only people who would come to play his game would be "the ones with an irreverent sense of play, but who also enjoy competitive sports."

The playing field is a circle, 50 meters in diameter with a tall goal post in the middle. A smaller circle called the "key," measuring five to eight meters (approximately 16 to 26 feet) in diameter, is made around the goal using, ideally, small plastic cones, or whatever is on hand. (Rolled-up socks are a perfectly suitable substitute). Each team scores through the same goal, but from opposite directions.

Teams can have between three to eight players, and a goalie if there are more than four players on each team. Though players are not allowed to wrestle, goalies are permitted to make full contact with each other.

The key is perhaps the most critical aspect of Circle Rules. No player except the goalie can touch the ball within its confines. All other players must be outside the key to touch the ball. Players can lean over the edge of the key and touch the ball, so long as their feet are on the ground outside the key. If players dive into the key, they must make contact with the ball before they do so with the ground.

Though the Circle Rules community is steadily growing in New York and beyond – it's been played in more than 100 schools across the country – Manley says it’s hard to keep track of just how many people are involved. He knows of some loyal followers in London and Toronto, but usually the only way to find out that people are playing it is when someone asks him for a rulebook.

Manley is now focusing on getting the game to college campuses, which he considers "hotbeds for new ideas to take off." He recently approached 15 East Coast colleges but he didn't receive a response from any.

'The thing about this game is that you can put it in your backpack and play anywhere, this theater that I created.' So Manley has decided that the best way to try to integrate Circle Rules into college life is by disseminating it far enough, with the hope that some college students somewhere would pick it up and go back and teach it to their friends on campus.

"It's difficult," Manley says, "but I feel that its potential is just so strong that I need to pursue it."

Lately, Manley has been spending his energy on recruiting for the 2011 New York City league. The opening game of the season (which runs until August 30) took place at Bushwick Inlet Park in Brooklyn last week.

Circle Rules has been played at a number of sports festivals in New York over the past few years, including the Come Out & Play Festival, the Fringe Festival, Figments, and even at festivals in Pittsburgh and Bristol, England.

"The thing about this game is that you can put it in your backpack and play anywhere, this theater that I created," Manley says. "That was the victory immediately. You could have a whole show in 15 minutes."

You might not see Circle Rules at the Olympics any time soon, but that doesn't matter to the diehards descending upon Prospect Park every weekend. For them, the curtain never comes down.

Pahull Bains is a writer/copy editor for Starring NYC, recent intern at Teen Vogue*, and soon-to-be graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She has also interned at The Indian Express, one of India’s leading newspapers. Follow her on Twitter at @pahullbains.*Photos: Top: Sasha Arutyunova; Manley: Blaine Davis